Wikipedia's term "Shinkansen" points out that "(Safety record) During the Shinkansen's 48-year history, nearly 7 billion-passenger history, there have been no passenger fatalities due to derailments or collisions, despite frequent earthquakes and typhoons."

Since Wiki offers instant update that is often accurate, we've decided to adopt the data. Unexpectedly, someone searched out the following information from Chinese media sina that ran like this:Weird wind blows over Japanese Shinkansen express train: 4 dead 33 injuured

Tokyo (Xinhua News Agency) December 26 (2005) On the night of December 25, Japanese Shinkansen express train Rice Ears 14 (稻穗14号) was attacked by a strange wind when the train entered Yamagata Prefecture (山形县) of northern Japan and derailed. Four were killed, 33 wounded.Click to check out the news in Chinese:http://news.sina.com...37827091s.shtml

I don't know Japanese language, which led to the difficulty of googling in Japanese. So we are not certain whether the sina message is true or not, or whether the Wiki term Shinkansen (safty record) has made a mistake.

Wikipedia is correct in saying that there have been no fatalities. The Inaho is a Limited Express train, which while high speed (by US standards...), is not "Shinkansen".

I imagine that Xinhua got a little confused when writing their news article due to what seems to be a common misconception that all intercity lines in Japan are Shinkansen. There is some level of overlap between the services - they generally are both long-distance intercity trains, but they are two completely different things.

Shinkansen trains run on a network of dedicated high speed rail lines (with the exception of some mini-shinkansen I think). Limited Express trains run on standard rail lines, and do not run anywhere as fast as the Shinkansen (120kph vs ~300kph)

If one wants a graphic to show the difference between the two, here you go

April 25, 2005 — Japan — Amagasaki rail crash, Amagasaki, Hyōgo. A train derails on sharp curve and smashes into an apartment building. 107 people die, 549 are injured. Investigation shows the driver was speeding because of a slight delay.